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Censorship in South Asia offers an expansive and comparative exploration of cultural regulation in contemporary and colonial South Asia. These provocative essays by leading scholars broaden our understanding of what censorship might mean -- beyond the simple restriction and silencing of public communication -- by considering censorship's productive potential and its intimate relation to its apparent opposite, "publicity." The contributors investigate a wide range of public cultural phenomena, from the cinema to advertising, from street politics to political communication, and from the adjudication of blasphemy to the management of obscenity.

"Censorship in South Asia offers an expansive and comparative exploration of cultural regulation in contemporary and colonial South Asia. These provocative essays by leading scholars broaden our understanding of what censorship might mean -- beyond the simple restriction and silencing of public communication -- by considering censorship's productive potential and its intimate relation to its apparent opposite, 'publicity.' The contributors investigate a wide range of public cultural phenomena, from the cinema to advertising, from street politics to political communication, and from the adjudication of blasphemy to the management of obscenity"--Provided by publisher

Viral videos, murals, graffiti, performance activism, tumbling statues, and Black Atlantic film screenings are all part of empowering audio-visual-digital narratives that contribute to the rising momentum against ongoing institutional racism - on the backs of the legacies of colonialism, slavery and exploitation across the world. From the Rhodes Must Fall movement that started in South Africa, the townships of Johannesburg, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Black Lives Matter in US and UK, to the reclaiming of rights of indigenous communities, migrant 'braccianti' in Italy, Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories among other ethno-racial minorities - audiovisual-digital conduits have connected local and global struggles for rights and recognition in the face of state brutality, corporate collaborations and racist violent attacks. This is amid growing awareness of the disproportionate impact of the COVID19 pandemic on marginalised Black, migrant, minority, and indigenous communities – further linking social exclusion and health inequalities to ethnic or racial discrimination.

This article investigates the changing currency of racial politics in jazz music formations, with a comparative focus on Nazi and contemporary Germany. While it is noted that music articulates politics in an oblique or metonymic way, in highly-charged contexts music is lent further propositional capacity. This is highlighted in Nazi Germany where jazz music was seen as barbaric, `dark' and uncivilized, and classical music represented order and cultural supremacy. These dynamics continue but, often, in a slightly askew form for contemporary articulations of racial essentialisms: present-day fascist music is a repository of whiteness, but `darkness' is sought in this putatively `white' music, while jazz now serves as a moniker of comfort, and an `antiquated civility'. Each of these musical cultures invokes hybridity in a differential sense - either hybridity is suppressed or it is masked within racially essential matrices. These musical trajectories form the backdrop to an appreciation of the overlooked yet significant jazz dance fusion scene in contemporary Germany - where hybridity is fetishized, arguably as a means of renegotiating violent histories and contemporary racisms in Europe.

Over the past decade, incidents of rape, sexual discrimination, honour killing, acid attacks and sex-related murders in Indian cities have come under much media and public scrutiny, significantly impacting conceptions of gender, risk and women's safety in urban spaces. The city itself has become a dominant trope for underscoring the anxieties, discourses and exegeses of sexual violence, as exemplified in the oft-cited designation of Delhi as the 'rape capital of India'. This introduction to the themed section critically engages with 'the urban' in its attempts to understand sexual violence in India, and focuses on the multiple public (workplace, leisure, street lives) and private (domestic, intimate) arenas of urban life where sexual violence is encountered, and the resources they provide to counter it. The co-editors engage with the interdisciplinary research papers by contributing authors that show how sexual violence is '(en)countered' in women's right-wing politics, processes of cultural production, community health activism, experiences of aggressive relationships, and men's growing anxieties about women's self-determination in Indian cities. With a specific ethnographic emphasis on women's experiences, rhetoric, representation and resistance to harassment, the theme section analyses sexual violence through the lens of urban, social and spatial transformations in the region.